• EthicsPoint, a Portland startup whose software helps companies monitor business practices, reports that 2008 sales climbed $4 million -- 32 percent. (note: dollar figure has been corrected.) The company's work force grew by more than a third, to 119 employees -- all based in Oregon.

• Jive Softwarereports that '08 revenue increased by 70 percent over an unspecified amount in 2007.

• The Portland State Business Acceleratorreports that it had 22 resident businesses at the end of 2008, its highest number of tenants ever. Eight companies moved out during the year, most to downtown Portland.

• A group of open source software executives are pitching President Obama on the value of open source technology. Signatories to an open letter to the president include Stuart Cohen, the former head of OSDL, now CEO of the Portland-based Collaborative Software Initiative; and Don Klaiss, CEO of onetime Portland company Compiere. From their letter:

Open-source software brings transparency to software development. There are no "black boxes" in open-source software and therefore no need to guess what is going on "behind the scenes." Ultimately, this means a better product for everyone, because there is visibility at every level of the application, from the user interface to the data implementation. Furthermore, open-source software provides for platform independence, which makes quick deployments that benefit our citizens much easier and realistic.